My understanding is that the main protocol itself does not provide any money to those that developed or deployed it. However, they did set up a governance DAO,

My understanding is that the main protocol itself does not provide any money to those that developed or deployed it. However, they did set up a governance DAO, where some of the governance coins would be released to those who developed TC, and those coins could then be sold on the open market, allowing them to indirectly profit from developing TC. They could also be operating nodes in the relay network, in which relay nodes agree to pay for the gas used to withdrawal money in exchange for a fee. The initial developers could quite easily be profiting by running some of these relayers.